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Help! Can this Xmas baguette be saved?

December 25, 2010 - 7:09am

bnom

Help! Can this Xmas baguette be saved?

I was planning on making donD's baguette with 12 hour cold autolyse for a dinner tonight. Unfortunately I am spending the night at my daughters and left the bread at home which means it will have a 24 hour autolyse and Short bulk fermentation. My question is...is there any hope for this bread?should I do something to help it or do I just throw together a straight dough?

Since the request is urgent and nobody else seems to be active right now, I'll guess at an answer ...even though I haven't actually done this myself and so am not sure: My guess is the over-long autolyse with no yeast in the refrigerator won't really hurt much.

I'd guess the biggest problem will be that the dough is cold and will just sit there rather than bulk ferment until it warms up. As there is not yet any yeast to worry about killing, you should be able to "nuke" the dough in your microwave immediately after you take it out of the refrigerator before you do anything else with it.

I'd be rather afraid of small "hot spots" in the dough that are hot enough to kill yeast even though the surface of the dough doesn't feel particularly warm. So I suggest starting out with very short times, going only until the surface starts to feel barely warm, then kneading a bit to mix everything up, and finally checking the interior dough temperature with your instant read probe thermometer. When it gets up to 70F (or 80F depending on what desired dough temperature you prefer), that's enough.

I appreciate the reassurance. I got home at 12:30 and the dinner was at 5pm. I added yeast, water and salt at that point. Got the shaped, risen baguettes in the oven at 4pm. And surprise surprise-- they were the nicest looking threesome of baguettes I have ever made. Flavor was a little sweet. Nice crumb but not as nice as usual -- still, I was very pleased to present those loaves at dinner. So, glad to see that even a super long autolyze and short bulk fermentation can result in a great loaf!

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